This is an
amalgamation of two trips to Nevado on successive months: 2nd - 4th
April and 2nd – 4th May. Some of the events occurred in
April, some in May. I'm revisiting Nevado as promised in this blog post here.
It is four o’clock in the morning when the regular hum
changes to a whine that rises and falls. At a time when the whole of Mexico
should be asleep, there are three people awake inside our small refugio. One of us opens a door to
briefly illuminate a room full of screens; then enters, shutting it fast behind
him. Another opens the front door. Outside it is six degrees above freezing,
and the night appears black as smoke. Within a few seconds, however, my eyes
have adjusted to the darkness. The stars are fantastic here; it is always easy
to pick out Orion, standing watch. In the middle distance his fallen friends
twinkle in an orange puddle: Colima. Despite the throbbing activity of the
lights down there, I am sure that most of the 160,000 people in the state
capital are asleep. It’s a quiet city town, after all, where nothing ever
happens. Nothing is what we are looking for now. The orange puddle is cut off
abruptly by a great, vast darkness, an enormous mass that blocks out half the
rift valley. If I wait, and squint my eyes in the cool air, I can see a black
plume unfurling from the summit, gradually blotting out the stars. This is the
silent source of the alarm: Volcán de Colima
is erupting.
_____________________
Colima city lazes at 600 metres above sea level. In May we
are nearing the rainy season, and every day brings more heat. As I wrote this
at seven p.m. in the park near my house, temperatures had cooled to 30°C; the
swings creaked, women chattered, people were starting to wake up. Life there is
swimming in a hazy mist. The refuge at Nevado, meanwhile, squats proudly at
4000 metres, in such a different environment that it seems another continent
entirely, or another world. Surprising that only 40 kilometres separate the
two. At Nevado, spires of pines rise to thirty metres in height, then fall away
to stunted wisps as they near the tree line. The face of the mountain is bare
and uncompromising. The air here is stainless and sharp, and a pristine crisp
blue that stands in contrast to Colima’s faded skies. I breathe in great fresh
gulps of alpine air, and imagine that I am cleaning myself from the inside out.
____________________
Of
course it takes a while to get up here. If you pay attention on the drive, it’s
possible to see the world change around you. We begin at toll road 54, and
cross the state boundary into Jalisco. Continue on towards Ciudad Guzman, and then towards a dusty, forgotten town called El Grullo. Just beyond it begins a track
25 kilometres long that will take us to our destination. The first few hundred
metres are so deeply rutted and pitted that it’s a wonder anyone can get up the
road, but get up it they do: Nevado de
Colima is a popular national park, and the lower slopes of the mountain are
dotted with picnic benches and campsites. We are going all the way. There’s
three of us in the truck today: James and Alex and I. I’m not driving,
fortunately, because this allows me to see the scenery evolve around me. On the
lower slopes there are avocado farms, the trees’ trunks painted white and tufty
grass growing between; in the middle, massive and dignified oaks hang drooping
moss from their branches, creating a dappled shade; these give way at high
altitude to tall and fragrant pines. The flowers don’t thin as we climb, but
their colours change. The lowest slopes had many growing with the avocados, a
bouquet of red hibiscus and starry yellow and enormous pink trumpet-flowers. At
3700 metres there are star-petalled white flowers, tiny like edelweiss, hidden between the rocks. Around
here the road splits. You can turn right, down to el Playon, the saddle between the two mountains, with its pine
forest and access to the parasitic domes of Volcancito.
Alternatively you can go left, up to the refugio.
There’s only one kilometre to drive, but the road is narrow and slippery, and
the last four bends make a hairpin seem generous. In this field trip we forgo
the bends, and leave our truck parked at the bottom of the split, while we
labour up with our equipment. Usually we radio through to Ciudad Guzmán in advance, to let the headquarters of the Protección Civil de Jalisco (PCJ) know that we’re coming. The message is
rarely passed on, however, and true enough, when we knock on the refugio’s front door, it is opened by an
enormous, red-headed Mexican who regards us quizzically. His expression doesn’t
clear when we tell him that we have come to stay for two nights. For a second I
worry – we’re here with three boxes of equipment that we’ve lugged up, is he
really not going to let us in? – but eventually he smiles charmingly, and opens
the door. His name is Aaron, and he’s a bombero,
a fireman who works with the Civil Protection of Jalisco state and is
posted up here occasionally for duty. Aaron is a typical bombero: amiable, curious, full of fun. When I
tell him my name he responds, ‘Like the movie, Frozen?’.
_____________________
We left Colima at half-past eight and arrive at Nevado at
one o’clock. From now we have exactly 48 hours of monitoring to perform. Throughout
the night there are generally always three of us awake: two CIIV students and a
bombero. The PCJ maintain a permanent presence at the refugio, as a team of three do a 24-hour shift, changing over every
day at 11 a.m.. In the mornings we see the team of incoming bomberos rolling up the track towards us, their
compact 4x4 making light of the less-than-hairpin bends. The CIIV presence at
Nevado is less frequent. We come up here occasionally, hopefully once a month,
and our team is of three, too (if we’re lucky) or two (if we’re not). The
two-team is brutal, because the night shifts are so long. The bomberos have a relatively easy time during the
night: they have a series of infrared cameras, with many monitors, so all there
is to do is watch the live feed in the room of screens, and radio Ciudad Guzmán if there’s an eruption. CIIV has rather
more to do. We have a thermal camera and a visual one, the former of which is a
primadonna and our main reason for
being up at this ungodly hour. Thermocam is very particular about the SD cards
it accepts, and taking photos every 3.5 seconds eats up memory. The result is
that the memory card only lasts 25 minutes at some time, and someone must be on
hand to change it. The visual camera needs its own TLC, with regularly changed
batteries; there is also the weather sensor and notes to take in case of
degassing activity or eruption. I must admit that there is something fantastic
about an eruption in the dark. That alarm that is a constant soundtrack to your
time here, that one-note hum, its monotony changes: the undulating wail of the
siren is your call to arms. Generally the volcano itself is silent, although I
know that back in January there were spectacular explosions and volcanic lightning.
I like to watch the eruption unfold through the LCD display of the thermal
camera: the volcano, unfamiliarly rendered in Technicolour tones, lets loose a
dramatic curl of ash and gas, a glamorous cigarette. The first instant of the
eruption is hottest. A white spot on the screen, a burning coal. Temperatures
recorded by the camera are relative and have to be corrected for, but a
measurement of 240°C is the highest I’ve seen.
____________________
The bomberos are a friendly bunch, and because their shifts
rotate, over the course of our two days here we’ll meet nine of them. It is interesting
to see how they interact with each other, and with us. Some are playful, like a
group of schoolkids on a holiday – the second shift gleefully hold burping and
farting contests, and drag their mattresses around the fire sleepover-style.
These cool kids are exceptionally warm, and turf us out to the screen room
under the pretence that it is comfier there. I would argue with them – except
that they maintain the wood-burning fire, which presumably means that they can
lift pine trunks and handle an axe. Moreover, some of the bomberos are in a bad mood. They can’t hide
their disgruntlement at being here (it’s a mandatory part of their work) and
spend all day hunched in an armchair, watching The Walking Dead on tiny iPhone screens. Still other bomberos are very curious. One takes an interest
in me being Scottish, and tells me about a guy called John Stevenson who used
to work with Nick at CIIV and played the bagpipes. The firemen may not be
interested in volcanology, but they are good sports.
____________________
What I enjoy most at Nevado is that there are always
surprises. Even when monitoring for 48 hours constantly, sharing responsibility
between three people means that there is only 16 hours of work each for every
day; and so when we are not marking time, we’re killing it. Alex’s pack of Monopoly
Deal, played in never-ending rounds, goes down like a storm; I sketch the
mountains and write about what we’re doing, which surprisingly amounts to a couple
of thousand words of text. On a craggy ridge the refugio is isolated but we can wander around: to the weather station on
the nearby hill, to our infrasound that we have set up below, and of course there
is the mountain itself. Only three hundred metres higher than us – surely it
can’t be that difficult to summit?
James and I begin at 3 p.m. of our second day, lathered in
sunscreen and carrying only water. Alex is left to take care of the equipment,
and we promise to return in three hours. Our trip up the mountain guarantees
him the same time off duty the following day, should he wish to take it.
The first part of the route is a difficult scramble up
behind the refugio, with a stack of enormous aerials ahead of us. The
knife-ridge is narrow and windswept and made more treacherous by the
distractingly beautiful views to both left and right – left, into Jalisco, with
Ciudad Guzmán in the bottom of the rift valley and pine trees in the
foreground; and right, into Colima, towards the city and home, with Volcán de
Colima standing proudly in front. We clamber our way among the rocks and
scramble down a mighty cliff, not falling but landing, quite anticlimactically,
on soft, powdery earth. We have hit the ash fall.
There is a faint thread of path through this lunar landscape
and we follow it towards the hulking behemoth of rock. In mid-afternoon sun the
western face of Nevado is made rugged and handsome. After we reach the footwall
of rock our path dies out, and we must create our own. We run into two other
hikers, a couple of Americans who are studying in Guadalajara, and we exchange chat
– all of us are mystified as to where we’re supposed to go to reach the summit.
They’re tired and James and I leave them in the dust, carrying on ahead to God
knows where. Suddenly, there it is: just under a rocky shoulder, a cairn, and a
couple of straight poles of bamboo. That must be a sign. We ascend the final
part of the mountain by these strange markers, and the top marks the same: a
metal crucifix, with crumpled bracelets tied round and the tattered remains of
a Mexican flag.
The view at the top is breath-taking, in many ways. At 4286
metres, the air is reed-thin. The final hundred metres of ascent were steep,
and we take a few minutes to catch our breaths. The altitude has caught us, but
the view makes up for it. In all directions we can see, into two states
simultaneously, towards the sea to our south and to both sides of the rift
valley, east and west, and even to Guadalajara, to our north. The distant hills
are a uniform shade of blue, as finely cut as glass at the summit, but rubbed
out to an indistinct white near the base. The sole summit untouched by the heat
is the volcano to our south. Not five minutes after we have topped out, a plume
of smoke streams out from the top. It’s perfect.
James and I return to the refugio, famished. It’s near the
end of our second day so there isn’t a lot of food left to eat. I remember that
we brought up a bag of marshmallows to toast on the fire, and wonder idly where
they are. Next afternoon, just before leaving, the truth is revealed.
I am doing a final sweep-round of the refugio for leftover possessions and/or tequila, and decide to check the
screen room. I find two of the bomberos on the leather sofa, cuddled together
under a blanket, watching an episode of Friends.
Just as I ask them about the marshmallows, I spy a crumpled polythene bag
on the counter, clearly recently enjoyed. I tell them they've eaten my candy. Their looks of dismay are almost sincere. There’s something
rather sweet about thinking of bomberos snuffling bombónes.
_____________________
It’s three o’clock on our third day, and beyond time for us
to go. We load our equipment into the back of the truck, and head down the
narrow track to our ordinary world. We are swelled with our success, with 48
hours of successfully gathered footage, a mountain summited, and a fair few
laughs. The sun shines and we bounce along the road, singing along to music on
Alex’s phone. A few small divots on the road ahead – only minor potholes. We
roll over them, spring up and sag down, and the Toyota makes the strangest
squelch. The cab keels. We go out and inspect the route. Only a minor pothole,
but it has sheared our axle clean off! We’re 14 kilometres from proper
civilization, and the cell phone reception is patchy. As we try to contact our
friends back in Colima, we prepare ourselves for a long wait; out comes the
Monopoly Deal. It’s been an intense 48 hours of adventure here at Nevado de
Colima, and it appears that there is more to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment